Age Correlations and An Old Earth, Version 2 No 1

But not against actual empirical objective evidence, such as we have for an old earth. It doesn't take much to show that claims for a young earth are bogus and misinformed or plain lies.Of course you could prove me wrong by trotting out some evidence along with those preconceived assumptions you go on about. You must use the same approach to this information as you do to claims of a young earth -- listening to oil magnate puppets instead of looking at actual empirical objective evidence, because it doesn't take much to show that climate change is happening and that it is predominantly due to use of fossil fuels and the exhaust of CO₂ into the atmosphere.The sea is rising
The temperatures are setting records
The ice caps are melting
It correlates with CO₂I was tempted to say you are off topic, but part of the evidence for an old earth is the correlations in the data to climate -- why do the different measuring systems that have markers for climate -- like tree ring widths and ice core δ¹⁸O variations -- correlate with climate variations, eg they have the same patterns of variations for the ages they measure?Ice Core Paleoclimatology Publications | Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center

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ABSTRACT The first ice-core record of both the Holocene and Wisconsin/Wiirm Late Glacial Stage (LGS) from the subtropics has been extracted from three ice cores to bedrock from the Dunde ice cap on the north-central Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau. ... The ice cores have been dated using a combination of annual layers in the insoluble dust and δ¹⁸O in the upper sections of core, visible dust layers which are annual, and ice-flow modeling. The oxygen isotope record which serves as a temperature proxy indicates that the last 60 years have been the warmest in the entire record.

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All these analyses lead us to conclude that the lower 10 m in the Dunde ice cap represent ice deposited during the last glacial stage. The high dust concentrations correlate closely with δ¹⁸O depletion (temperature proxy) as found in all polar cores extending below the LGS/Holocene transition. ...

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Funny how the evidence keeps piling up, and how evidence for an old earth also provides evidence of past climates keeps showing the modern trend is real and climate change is happening.Enjoy

You are wrong. The natural sciences are the most reliable ways of explaining what we observe around us. The natural sciences work very well in explaining naturally occurring phenomena.

So you are saying that scientists already assumed the earth is old before they start counting tree rings? varve layers? ice core layers? That these facts uncovered are not really evidence of age?Fascinating. Demonstrably False, but fascinating to see how cognitive dissonance tries to disparage dissonant information ... So you are saying that scientists already assumed that the mechanisms of evolution are valid before they start looking for mutations and start measuring the change in frequency of alleles in breeding populations from generation to generation? That the observation of natural selection in action based on variation in the populations are not really evidence of evolution?Fascinating. Demonstrably False, but fascinating to see how cognitive dissonance tries to disparage dissonant information ... Except for all those religious scientists ... like Dr. Roger C. Wiens

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Radiometric Dating
A Christian Perspective

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Arguments over the age of the Earth have sometimes been divisive for people who regard the Bible as God's word. Even though the Earth's age is never mentioned in the Bible, it is an issue because those who take a strictly literal view of the early chapters of Genesis can calculate an approximate date for the creation by adding up the life-spans of the people mentioned in the genealogies. Assuming a strictly literal interpretation of the week of creation, even if some of the generations were left out of the genealogies, the Earth would be less than ten thousand years old. Radiometric dating techniques indicate that the Earth is thousands of times older than that--approximately four and a half billion years old. Many Christians accept this and interpret the Genesis account in less scientifically literal ways. However, some Christians suggest that the geologic dating techniques are unreliable, that they are wrongly interpreted, or that they are confusing at best. Unfortunately, much of the literature available to Christians has been either inaccurate or difficult to understand, so that confusion over dating techniques continues.

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The next few pages cover a broad overview of radiometric dating techniques, show a few examples, and discuss the degree to which the various dating systems agree with each other. The goal is to promote greater understanding on this issue, particularly for the Christian community. Many people have been led to be skeptical of dating without knowing much about it. For example, most people don't realize that carbon dating is only rarely used on rocks. God has called us to be "wise as serpents" (Matt. 10:16) even in this scientific age. In spite of this, differences still occur within the church. A disagreement over the age of the Earth is relatively minor in the whole scope of Christianity; it is more important to agree on the Rock of Ages than on the age of rocks. But because God has also called us to wisdom, this issue is worthy of study.

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Then there is this: Christian Geologists on Noah's Flood: Biblical and Scientific Shortcomings of Flood Geology, part 4

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We will employ tree rings and carbon-14, but not in the way readers may be accustomed to seeing. We will not use carbon-14 to determine an age at all. We will simply measure how much carbon-14 is currently found in each tree ring. Carbon-14 decays with time, so if each tree ring represents one year of growth, we should see a steady decline in the carbon-14 content of each successive ring. Figure 5 shows tree-ring carbon-14 data from living trees extending back 4000 rings.[2] ...

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If additional confidence in this data is desired, it may be helpful to note that the amount of carbon-14 found in a timber from a tunnel in Jerusalem thought to have been built by Hezekiah is approximately the same as the amount found in tree ring number 2700, which places its ring-counting age where expected from Biblical records if each ring equals one year. Even better, consider the Dead Sea Scrolls — the book of Isaiah in particular. ... The amount of carbon-14 in the Isaiah scrolls is equal to or less than the amount in tree ring number 2100, meaning carbon-14 confirms its before-Christ historicity.[3]

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Figure 4 shows varve data from Steel Lake and Lake Suigetsu extended to the limit of carbon-14 detection. Serious consideration of this data should be sobering for the committed Young-Earther.

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The graphs appears to start with year 2000 CE (rather than 1950). This adds 2050 BP (100 BCE) and 2650 BP (700 BCE) to the list of correlations of historical artifact to dendrochronological age by 14C content.Note that this is NOT a 14C age calibration curve, it is a plot of the natural log of actual measured modern day 14C/14C_(1950CE) levels vs annual calendar values from tree rings and lake varves, and this plot does not depend in any way on the half-life of 14C -- it just uses the ln(14C measured) for levels measured today.Note further that there is a discussion of the original Lake Suigetsu varve research at Accuracy in Genesis: Lake Varves

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One of the products of the continuing cycles of the seasons can be found on the bottoms of some lakes. Each spring, tiny plants bloom in Lake Suigetsu, a small body of water in Japan. When these one-cell algae die, they drift down, shrouding the lake floor with a thin, white layer. The rest of the year, dark clay sediments settle on the bottom. At the bottom of Lake Suigetsu, thin layers of microscopic algae have been piling up for many years. The alternating layers of dark and light count the years like tree rings. ...

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The results from just one source could possibly be readily contested, but in this case the scientists have correlated the results from multiple sources including that of Lake Gosciaz (Poland), German oak and pine tree ring chronologies and also calibrations from coral data. Many in the scientific community are proposing the result of the above study as a "calibration" to radiometric C14 data, see Appendix A. Also the data seems to indicate no more that a 16.7 percent error due to deviation of C14 in the atmosphere for the past 40,000 years.

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Conclusion: The apparent close correlation of the dating results from multiple sources appears to be strong evidence for an earth much older than 10,000 years!

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Also C14 dating affirms Scripture/Scripture affirms C14 dating!

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This recognizes that the consilience in the data from different sources gives high confidence in the results.Did those people start with your pre-assumptions?Or did they start with the pre-assumption that objective empirical evidence actually represents reality, that following where the evidence leads, not preconceptions, tells us the earth is old?EnjoyEdited by RAZD, : .Edited by RAZD, : correction

So all the evidence is really a trick played by a trickster god ... Loki comes to mind. Or last-Thursdayism.You prefer fantasy to reality it seems. So if I totally ignore reality I can live in the delusions of your world. If you ignore the problems do they go away? Do they magically disappear?Sorry. I prefer reality. Logical fail. Demonstrably false as well. When the world was accepted as orbiting the sun instead of vice-versa, that was not taken as proof that everything else in the Bible was wrong. The belief in a young earth is no more important to belief in the Bible than was belief in a geocentric universe.You do realize that the purported YECie age of the earth is based on many assumptions -- and that no two such assessments have come to the same end result? Why is that? Actually it failed to match reality. And a rather pathetic attempt by one person does not a world wide conspiracy make. Wiki has this to say:

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Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (1996; second edition 2006) is a book by Michael J. Behe, a professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania and a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture. In the book Behe presents his notion of irreducible complexity and argues that its presence in many biochemical systems therefore indicates that they must be the result of intelligent design rather than evolutionary processes. In 1993, Behe had written a chapter on blood clotting in Of Pandas and People, presenting essentially the same arguments but without the name "irreducible complexity",[1] which he later presented in very similar terms in a chapter in Darwin's Black Box. Behe later agreed that he had written both and agreed to the similarities when he defended intelligent design at the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial.[2][3]

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Reception

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Darwin's Black Box was not well received by the scientific community, which rejected Behe's premises and arguments. Kenneth Miller described Behe's argument as an updated version of the argument from design with reference to biochemistry (which was echoed by other reviewers),[10][11] and also cites areas in biochemistry and the fossil record which demonstrate currently irreducibly complex systems evolving. Miller also describes Behe's theory as unfalsifiable, arguing that it arbitrarily ignores evidence that shows the evolution of a biochemical system.[12] On his blog, PZ Myers described it as "...an example of pseudoscientific dreck that has been enormously influential."[13] In a review for Nature, Jerry Coyne described the book hailing from 'populist' creationism that failed to deal with the evidence for evolution honestly. Coyne also accuses Behe of quote mining and using ad hominem attacks against scientists while 'timidly accepting' evolution.[4]

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A review on the pro-evolution website talk.origins, described the book as "...an exposition of the Frontiers of Ignorance" and that within it systems were labeled "irreducibly complex" if Behe was not able to envision a simpler system that still worked. The review also stated that the theory was unfalsifiable (echoing Miller[12]), with faulty logic that worked because Behe did not provide crucial facts that would illustrate its failings.[14] H. Allen Orr has called Behe's argument in the book "...just plain wrong", arguing that gradual adaptation could produce irreducibly complex systems. Orr points to examples of gradual adaptation already known (citing to the work of H. J. Muller in the early 20th century[15]). Behe is also criticized for claiming a conspiracy of silence among scientists regarding the 'failure of Darwinism'.[10]

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Richard Dawkins criticized the book for the New York Times as being logically flawed by setting up a false dichotomy in which Darwinian evolution is rejected despite an enormous amount of positive evidence due to a single apparent failure to explain irreducible complexity. Dawkins further commented that it was an argument Darwin himself had anticipated, and he stated that the example of a bacterial flagellum used by Behe had in fact been refuted by Kenneth R. Miller in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District.[5] ...

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Peer review controversy

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In 2005, while testifying for the defense in the Dover trial, Behe claimed under oath that the book had received a more thorough peer review than a scholarly article in a refereed journal,[20] a claim which appears to conflict the facts of the book's peer review.[21] Four of the book's five reviewers (Michael Atchison, Robert Shapiro, K. John Morrow, and Russell Doolittle) have made statements that contradict or otherwise do not support Behe's claim of the book passing a rigorous peer review.

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Michael Atchison

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Atchison has stated that he did not review the book at all, but spent 10 minutes on the phone receiving a brief overview of the book which he then endorsed without ever seeing the text.[22]

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Robert Shapiro

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Shapiro has said that he reviewed the book, and while he agreed with some of its analysis of origin-of-life research, he thought its conclusions are false, though the best explanation of the argument from design that was available.[23] Had the book been submitted to a peer-reviewed journal and this comment had appeared, the review provided by Shapiro would have forced the conclusions regarding intelligent design to be changed or removed.[23]

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K. John Morrow

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Morrow criticized the book as appalling and unsupported, which contributed to the original publisher turning down the book for publication.[24]

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Russell Doolittle

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Doolittle, upon whom Behe based much of his discussion of blood clotting, described it as misrepresenting a simplified explanation he had given in a lecture, and presenting a fallacious creationist miscalculation of improbability by omitting known options,[25] which also contributed to the original publisher turning down the book for publication.[26]

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In the same trial, Behe eventually testified under oath that "There are no peer reviewed articles by anyone advocating for intelligent design supported by pertinent experiments or calculations which provide detailed rigorous accounts of how intelligent design of any biological system occurred".[27] The result of the trial was the ruling that intelligent design is not science and is essentially religious in nature.

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Not a book - or an author - I would use to honestly represent reality.And none of it disproves or falsifies an old earth. None of it challenges the methods used to measure the age of the earth. None of it explains the correlations of different methods and the consilience of results.Enjoy

Oops, RAZD,Answers in Genesis are not likely to take Suigetsu varves as evidence for long age, but Accuracy in Genesis might!

Fixed, thanks.

Ya know, you've got the beginnings of a useful book in these posts.

Yes, that is a project I am working on. It will require contacting all the people for permission to use their information. I've talked to a number already.The next step I am looking at is to put the new version all together in one topic that could be place on the correspondent forum, The way my building blocks #1 post was done.That would be a trial "publishing" if you will, open for peer review ...Enjoy

If trees grew fast in the distant past, rings would not be any correlation or way to determine ages because trees growing in weeks and their rings could not be seasonal/yearly rings.

Indeed, and we also know that the cells making up the tree rings in faster growing portions of the year are visibly different from those in the slower growing portions of the year, they are larger.Enjoy

And if trees grew faster in the distant past, ice cores would have to accumulate at exactly the same rate in the distant past, corals would have to grow at exactly the same rate in the distant past, and varves would have to be laid down at the same rate in the distant past. All over the world.Because they all agree to an astonishing degree, which demands explanation. It's called "consilience". We have an explanation. Do you?As an incomplete example:

And if there was a ladder to the moon we could climb up there, and wouldn't need rockets.The "what-ifs" creationists come up with are about as funny, and well supported by evidence as that ladder to the moon.But we understand the purpose of the "what-ifs." If any doubt, no matter how outlandish, can be raised against what science has learned then creationists can go oncontinue believing what science has disproved. All it takes is a simple, "what-if" and a lot of self-delusion.Creationists make the Queen in Alice look like a piker--she could only believe six impossible things before breakfast.

We even saw CRR doing that in the Flat Earth discussion (see Message 96) in how he took a Neil deGrasse Tyson statement of simple ballistics kinematics and kept throwing in factors and twisting them about in order to conclude: IOW, their goal is not to discover nor learn nor understand anything, but rather to discredit science in any way possible, no matter how insignificantly or how many contortions they have to go through or how many lies they have to throw in. The purpose of their evolutions (Navy-speak) is to enable them to cherry-pick from science, such that they feel free to reject what they believe conflicts with their theology while keeping those parts of science that brings them their computers and flush toilets.But their evolutions also serve to demonstrate that YEC is false. Recent discussions in the attempts to explain the scientific method to PorknCheese brought up the point that one of the purposes for forming hypotheses is to construct test cases for testing a theory. You form an explanation for something (in science AKA "theory") but you need to test it. So you use the theory to generate hypotheses, which are basically predictions of what should happen, and then you see if they are correct.So when creationists come up with a "what if" as an "alternative explanation", that gives us something that we can test. And unsurprisingly, all their "alternative explanations" have failed those tests. All of which demonstrate that YEC is false.Back in 1984 I heard Dr. Gish claim that philosopher of science Larry Laudan agreed with him about Judge Overton's decision in the 1981 Arkansas trial. I wrote to the ICR and Gish sent me a copy of the article. Apparently Gish had not read the entire article, which condemned "creation science" in very strong terms -- from Science at the Bar -- Causes for Concern by Larry Laudan, Science, Technology and Human Values 7, no. 41 (1982):16-19 (my emphasis added):

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At various key points in the Opinion, Creationism is charged with being untestable, dogmatic (and thus non-tentative), and unfalsifiable. All three charges are of dubious merit. For instance, to make the interlinked claims that Creationism is neither falsifiable nor testable is to assert that Creationism makes no empirical assertions whatever. This is surely false. Creationists make a wide range of testable assertions about empirical matters of fact.

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Thus, as Judge Overton himself grants (apparently without seeing its implications), the creationists say that the earth is of very recent origin (say 6,000 to 20,000 years old); they argue that most of the geological features of the earth's surface are diluvial in character (i.e., products of the postulated worldwide Noachian deluge); they are committed to a large number of factual historical claims with which the Old Testament is replete; they assert the limited variability of species. They are committed to the view that, since animals and man were created at the same time, the human fossil record must be paleontologically co-extensive with the record of lower animals. It is fair to say that no one has shown how to reconcile such claims with the available evidence -- evidence which speaks persuasively to a long earth history, among other things.

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In brief, these claims are testable, they have been tested, and they have failed those tests.

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You know that it is that way NOW! In the far past, say in the bristle-cone pines, if there were some visibly different rings, we would not know what caused them today!

Naturally ice layers would have also been different. Your correlations are flawed and all based on the present nature!